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• How to organize a Coding Dojo?

  - by Stephan

  Over on stack overflow it was asked how to organize a coding dojo (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4338567/how-to-organize-a-coding-dojo-event). I believe that may have been the wrong forum... I wonder the same thing: how is a Codeing Dojo organized? What is the structure of a meeting? How would one pick Katas? What do you plan ahead of time? I am interested in any ideas on this as well as links to any resource that may be outlining this.

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• What makes Instagram so valuable? [closed]

  - by ????

  If as in the FAQ, that topics about business (computer industry) is allowed here, I'd like to find out why Instagram can be so valuable, that it is acquired for $1 billion dollars (USD). To put it simply, isn't it just a photo enhancement app (such as making a photo vintage look), plus sharing those photos on Facebook? That's because in contrast, PlayFish had superb Facebook games, and many of them, and are so much more sophisticated (such as Restaurant City and Pet Society). And PlayFish was merely acquired for $400 million. Some companies such as RockYou, had the number one app on Facebook, but wasn't even acquired for a low price like $200 million. And now just a photo filter app and sharing photos, and it is a business considered to be worth a billion dollars. Why is that?

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• Are first-class functions a substitute for the Strategy pattern?

  - by Prog

  The Strategy design pattern is often regarded as a substitute for first-class functions in languages that lack them. So for example say you wanted to pass functionality into an object. In Java you'd have to pass in the object another object which encapsulates the desired behavior. In a language such as Ruby, you'd just pass the functionality itself in the form of an annonymous function. However I was thinking about it and decided that maybe Strategy offers more than a plain annonymous function does. This is because an object can hold state that exists independently of the period when it's method runs. However an annonymous function by itself can only hold state that ceases to exist the moment the function finishes execution. So my question is: when using a language that features first-class functions, would you ever use the Strategy pattern (i.e. encapsulate the functionality you want to pass around in an explicit object), or would you always use an annonymous function? When would you decide to use Strategy when you can use a first-class function?

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• Real-Time Multi-User Gaming Platform

  - by Victor Engel

  I asked this question at Stack Overflow but was told it's more appropriate here, so I'm posting it again here. I'm considering developing a real-time multi-user game, and I want to gather some information about possibilities before I do some real development. I've thought about how best to ask the question, and for simplicity, the best way that occurred to me was to make an analogy to the field (or playground) game darebase. In the field game of darebase, there are two or more bases. To start, there is one team on each base. The game is a fancy game of tag. When two people meet out in the field, the person who left his base most recently timewise captures the other person. They then return to that person's base. Play continues until everyone is part of the same team. So, analogizing this to an online computer game, let's suppose there are an indefinite number of bases. When a person starts up the game, he has a team that is located at, for example, his current GPS coordinates. It could be a virtual world, but for sake of argument, let's suppose the virtual world corresponds to the player's actual GPS coordinates. The game software then consults the database to see where the closest other base is that is online, and the two teams play their game of virtual tag. Note that the user of the other base could have a different base than the one run by the current user as the closest base to him, in which case, he would be in two simultaneous battles, one with each base. When they go offline, the state of their players is saved on a server somewhere. Game logic calls for the players to have some automaton-logic of some sort, so they can fend for themselves in a limited way using basic rules, until their user goes online again. The user doesn't control the players' movements directly, but issues general directives that influence the players' movement logic. I think this analogy is good enough to frame my question. What sort of platforms are available to develop this sort of game? I've been looking at smartfoxserver, but I'm not convinced yet that it is the best option or even that it will work at all. One possibility, of course, would be to roll out my own web server, but I'd rather not do that if there is an existing service out there already that I could tap into. I will be developing for iOS devices at first. So any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I think I need to establish the architecture first before proceeding with this project. Note that darbase is not the game I intend to implement, but, upon reflection, that might not be a bad idea either.

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• How to reduce tight coupling between two data sources

  - by fstuijt

  I'm having some trouble finding a proper solution to the following architecture problem. In our setting (sketched below) we have 2 data sources, where data source A is the primary source for items of type Foo. A secondary data source exists which can be used to retrieve additional information on a Foo; however this information does not always exist. Furthermore, data source A can be used to retrieve items of type Bar. However, each Bar refers to a Foo. The difficulty here is that each Bar should refer to a Foo which, if available, also contains the information as augmented by data source B. My question is: how to remove the tight coupling between data source A and B?

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• Is this an acceptable approach to undo/redo in Python?

  - by Codemonkey

  I'm making an application (wxPython) to process some data from Excel documents. I want the user to be able to undo and redo actions, even gigantic actions like processing the contents of 10 000 cells simultaneously. I Googled the topic, and all the solutions I could find involves a lot of black magic or is overly complicated. Here is how I imagine my simple undo/redo scheme. I write two classes - one called ActionStack and an abstract one called Action. Every "undoable" operation must be a subclass of Action and define the methods do and undo. The Action subclass is passed the instance of the "document", or data model, and is responsible for committing the operation and remembering how to undo the change. Now, every document is associated with an instance of the ActionStack. The ActionStack maintains a stack of actions (surprise!). Every time actions are undone and new actions are performed, all undone actions are removed for ever. The ActionStack will also automatically remove the oldest Action when the stack reaches the configurable maximum amount. I imagine the workflow would produce code looking something like this: class TableDocument(object): def __init__(self, table): self.table = table self.action_stack = ActionStack(history_limit=50) # ... def delete_cells(self, cells): self.action_stack.push( DeleteAction(self, cells) ) def add_column(self, index, name=''): self.action_stack.push( AddColumnAction(self, index, name) ) # ... def undo(self, count=1): self.action_stack.undo(count) def redo(self, count=1): self.action_stack.redo(count) Given that none of the methods I've found are this simple, I thought I'd get the experts' opinion before I go ahead with this plan. More specifically, what I'm wondering about is - are there any glaring holes in this plan that I'm not seeing?

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• What reasons are there to reduce the max-age of a logo to just 8 days? [closed]

  - by callum

  Most websites set max-age=31536000 (1 year) on the Cache-control headers of static assets such as logo images. Examples: YouTube Yahoo Twitter BBC But there is a notable exception: Google's logo has max-age=691200 (8 days). I've checked the headers on the Google logo in the past, and it definitely used to be 1 year. (Also, it used to be part of a sprite, and now it is a standalone logo image, but that's probably another question...) What could be valid technical reasons why they would want to reduce its cache lifetime to just 8 days? Google's homepage is one of the most carefully optimised pages in the world, so I imagine there's a good reason. Edit: Please make sure you understand these points before answering: Nobody uses short max-age lifetimes to allow modifying a static asset in future. When you modify it, you just serve it at a different URL. So no, it's nothing to do with Google doodles. Think about it: even if Google didn't understand this basic trick of HTTP, 8 days still wouldn't be appropriate, as only those users who don't have the original logo cached would see the doodle on doodle-day – and then that group of users would go on seeing the doodle for the following 8 days after Google changed it back :) Web servers do not worry about "filling up" the caches of clients (or proxies). The client manages this by itself – when it hits its own storage limit, it just starts dropping the lowest priority items to make space for new items. The priority score is based on the question "How likely am I to benefit from having cached this URL?", which is nothing to do with what max-age value the server sent when the URL was originally requested; it's a heuristic based on the "frecency" of requests for that URL. The max-age simply lets the server set a cut-off point – the time at which the client is supposed to discard the item regardless of how often it's being re-used. It would be very nice and trusting of a downstream client/proxy to rely on all origin servers "holding back" from filling up their caches, but I don't think we live in that world ;)

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• Answer programming for "What are your interests?" interview questions?

  - by Morgan Herlocker

  For interview questions that ask for personal hobbies, should you mention a bunch of tech activities you enjoy, like how "I love building java applets in my free time" or should you focus on non-programming activities to show you are well rounded? Does it show passion to say programming is a hobby, or does it sound disingenuous? I could see it going either way, so please back up your answer with some sound reasoning.

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• What is So Unique About Node.js?

  - by Adrian Shum

  Recently there has been a lot of praise for Node.js. I am not a developer that has had much exposure to network application. From my bare understanding of Nodes.js, its strength is: we have only one thread handling multiple connections, providing an event-based architecture. However, for example in Java, I can create only one thread using NIO/AIO (which is non-blocking APIs from my bare understanding), and handle multiple connections using that thread, and I provide an event-based architecture to implement the data handling logic (shouldn't be that difficult by providing some callback etc) ? Given JVM being a even more mature VM than V8 (I expect it to run faster too), and event-based handling architecture seems to be something not difficult to create, I am not sure why Node.js is attracting so much attention. Did I miss some important points?

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• Bringing in New Architecture During Maintenance on Legacy Systems

  - by Mike L.

  I have been tasked with adding some new features to a legacy ASP.NET MVC2 project. The codebase is a disaster and I want to write these new features with some thought behind the implementation and not just throw these new features into the mess. I would like to introduce things like dependency injection and the orchestrator pattern; just to the code that I am going to write. I don't have enough time to try to refactor the entire system. Is it OK to not be consistent with the rest of the codebase and add new features following different design principles? Should I not introduce new patterns and just get the features implemented? I feel like it might be confusing to the next person to see parts of the system using a design that other parts are not following.

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• Develop web site from existing software or cherry pick and use a web framework?

  - by erisco

  A small team and I are tasked with developing a web site. The client has referenced a particular open source project (we'll call it X) when describing some of the features. Because of this, the team wants to start with X and adapt it to satisfy the client. I have looked at X and its code and, in my opinion, it would be unwise. However, my experience is limited, and could really benefit from the insights of others so that I can figure out what I should be asserting as the right direction for the team. My red flags are going up and this is why. X was developed in the earlier days of PHP; 500 line blocks of code are the norm; global variables are abundant; giant switch cases are the norm for switching between which page is shown. There is no clear mapping between URL and where the code for that page sits. From a feature-set standpoint, X is actually software specialized for a different task and has dozens of features we don't need or have use for that come as core assumptions. We will be unable to adapt X through its plugin system. That said, there are a few features which can be mapped, with some modification, to suit our purposes. I believe this is the attraction the team feels. I would feel comfortable if, instead of using X directly, we lifted what is salvageable and useful to us. We can then use that code, and the same 3rd party libraries X is using, in a new code base built on top of a PHP web framework (particularly Agavi, so you understand what I mean by 'web framework'). The web framework gives us a strong MVC structure and provides the common facilities for web development, or adapters to work with 3rd party libraries that do so. We will also have a clean slate feature-wise to work from, which means we can work additively instead of subtractively. Because the code base is better structured, and contains none of what we don't need, it will be easier to document, which is a critical requirement of our client. So to summarize, the team wants to use X, whereas I want to take the bits we can from X and use a web framework instead. I want to bounce this opinion off of other's experiences so that I can be more informed. Thanks for your insight.

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• Microeconomical simulation: coordination/planning between self-interested trading agents

  - by Milton Manfried

  In a typical perfect-information strategy game like Chess, an agent can calculate its best move by searching the state tree for the best possible move, while assuming that the opponent will also make the best possible move (i.e. Mini-max). I would like to use this approach in a "game" modeling economic activity, where the possible "moves" would be to buy or sell for a given price, and the goal, rather than a specific class of states (e.g. Checkmate), would be to maximize some function F of the agent's state (e.g. F(money, widget) = 10*money + widget). How to handle buy/sell actions that require coordination between both parties, at the very least agreement upon a price? The cheap way out would be to set the price beforehand, maybe based upon the current supply -- but the idea of this simulation is to examine how prices emerge when freely determined by "perfectly rational" agents. A great example of what I do not want is the trading algorithm in SugarScape -- paraphrasing from Growing Artificial Societies p101-102: when a pair of agents interact to trade, they each compute their internal valuations of the goods, then a bargaining process is conducted and a price is agreed to. If this price makes both agents better off, they complete the transaction The protocol itself is beautiful, but what it cannot capture (as far as I can tell) is the ability for an agent to pay more than it might otherwise for a good, because it knows that it can sell it for even more at a later date -- what appears to be called "strategic thinking" in this pape at Google Books Multi-Agent-Based Simulation III: 4th International Workshop, MABS 2003... to get realistic behavior like that, it seems one would either (1) have to build an outrageously-complex internal valuation system which could at best only cover situations that were planned for at compile-time, or otherwise (2) have some mechanism to search the state tree... which would require some way of planning future trades. Note: The chess analogy only works as far as the state-space search goes; the simulation isn't intended to be "zero sum", so a literal mini-max search wouldn't be appropriate -- and ideally, it should work with more than two agents.

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• Are R&D mini-projects a good activity for interns?

  - by dukeofgaming

  I'm going to be in charge of hiring some interns for our software department soon (automotive infotainment systems) and I'm designing an internship program. The main productive activity "menu" I'm planning for them consists of: Verification testing Writing Unit Tests (automated, with an xUnit-compliant framework [several languages in our projects]) Documenting Code Updating wiki Updating diagrams & design docs Helping with low priority tickets (supervised/mentored) Hunting down & cleaning compiler/run-time warnings Refactoring/cleaning code against our coding standards But I also have this idea that having them do small R&D projects would be good to test their talent and get them to have fun. These mini-projects would be: Experimental implementations & optimizations Proof of concept implementations for new technologies Small papers (~2-5 pages) doing formal research on the previous two points Apps (from a mini-project pool) These kinds of projects would be pre-defined and very concrete, although new ideas from the interns themselves would be very welcome. Even if a project is too big or is abandoned, the idea would also be to lay the ground work so they can be retaken by another intern or intern team. While I think this is good in concept, I don't know if it could be good in practice, as obviously this would diminish their productivity on "real work" (work with immediate value to the company), but I think it could help bring aboard very bright people and get them to want to stay in the future (which, I think, is the end goal for any internship program). My question here is if these activities are too open ended or difficult for the average intern to accomplish and if R&D is an efficient use of an interns time or if it makes more sense for to assign project work to interns instead.

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• web services, J2EE, spring, DB integration project ideas- maybe data mining related?

  - by sj88

  Hey guys, I am a graduate CS student (Data mining and machine learning) and have a good exposure to core JAVA (3 years). I have read up a bunch of stuff on Design patterns J2EE Web services( soap and rest) spring and hibernate Java Concurrency - advanced features like Task and Executors. I would now like to do a project combining this stuff (over my free time of corse) to get a better understanding of these things and to kind of make an end to end software (to learn the best design principles etc + svn, maven). Any good project ideas would be really appreciated. I just wanna build this stuff to learn so I dont really mind re-inventing the wheel. Also, anything related to data mining would be an added bonus (fits with my research) but absolutly not necesary (since this project is more to learn to do large scale software developement)

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• Project Management Tool for developers and sysadmins: shared or separate?

  - by David

  Should a team of system administrators who are on a software development project share a project management tool with the developers or use their own separate one? We use Trac and I see the benefit in sharing since inter-team tasks can be maintained by a single system where there may be cross-over or misfiled bugs (e.g. an apparent bug which turns out to be a server configuration issue or a development cycle which needs a server to be configured before it can start) However sharing could be difficult since many system administration tasks don't coincide with a single development milestone if at all. So should a system administration team use a separate PM Tool or share the same one with the developers? If they should share, then how?

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• What is the proper response to lousy error message?

  - by William Pursell

  I've just come across (for the 47 millionth time) some code that looks like this: except IOError, e: print "Problems reading file: %s." % filename sys.exit( 1 ) My first reaction is very visceral: the person who coded this is a complete idiot. How hard is it to print error messages to stderr and to include the system error message in the string? I haven't used python in years, and it took me all of 4 minutes to track down the documentation to figure out how to get the error message from the exception object e and the syntax for printing to stderr. My "complete idiot" reaction was slightly lessened since at least a non-zero value is passed to sys.exit, but I still find this code offensive. My prime thought is that the developer who wrote this is a complete novice for whom I have zero respect. Am I over-reacting? Surely there are excuses for all sorts of bad coding practices, but is there anything that can possibly excuse this sort of $#|t? I guess there are two question here: one is a duplicate of What are developer's problems with helpful error messages?, and the other is "am I over-reacting, or is it valid to conclude that the author of the above code is a novice?"

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• How to add a new developer to the team

  - by lortabac

  I run a small company composed of only 2 developers. For one of our clients we are building a very big application, whose development has gone on for 1.5 years. Now this client has found an important sponsorship, and they are organizing some events related to this project, so we have a deadline in 2 months and we can't miss it. We are thinking of adding a new developer to the team, and I am wondering what we can do to help his integration. This is the situation: We are approaching the threshhold of Brooks's law, the point when adding new developers will be counter-productive. The application is relatively well designed, but the implementation is chaotic in some points (especially older code). There are unit tests only for more recent code. When this project started, we didn't have the habit of doing tests. Documentation and comments are incomplete. The application is both large and complex. The client has written down almost every detail about his project, in a very clear and "programmer-friendly" way. Is it a good idea to add a person now? If so, what can we do in order to help the new developer integrate into the team?

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• LuaJit FFI and hiding C implementation details

  - by wirrbel

  I would like to extend an application using LuaJit FFI. Having seen http://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutorial.html this is surprisingly easy when comparing this to the Lua C API. So far so good. However I do not plainly want to wrap C functions but provide a higher level API to users writing scripts for the application. Especially I do not want users to be able to access "primitives", i.e. the ffi.* namespace. Is this possible or will that ffi namespace be available to user's Lua scripts? On the issue of Sandboxing Lua I found http://lua-users.org/wiki/SandBoxes which is not talking about FFI though. Furthermore, the plan I have described above is assuming that the introduction of abstraction layers happens on the lua side of code. Is this an advisable approach or would you rather abstract functionality on the statically compiled code (on the C-side)?

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• How to structure my GUI agnostic project?

  - by Nezreli

  I have a project which loads from database a XML file which defines a form for some user. XML is transformed into a collection of objects whose classes derive from single parent. Something like Control - EditControl - TextBox Control - ContainterControl - Panel Those classes are responsible for creation of GUI controls for three different enviroments: WinForms, DevExpress XtraReports and WebForms. All three frameworks share mostly the same control tree and have a common single parent (Windows.Forms.Control, XrControl and WebControl). So, how to do it? Solution a) Control class has abstract methods Control CreateWinControl(); XrControl CreateXtraControl(); WebControl CreateWebControl(); This could work but the project has to reference all three frameworks and the classes are going to be fat with methods which would support all three implementations. Solution b) Each framework implementation is done in separate projects and have the exact class tree like the Core project. All three implementations are connected using a interface to the Core class. This seems clean but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Does anyone have a simpler solution or a suggestion how should I approach this task?

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• How do you deal with design in Scrum?

  - by Seth

  How do you deal with design in Scrum? Do you still have well written design documents for each scrum iteration? Do you just do design notes featuring UML diagrams? Or do you just have well commented code? Each iteration may involve changing design so I just wanted to know how people capture this so new developers have an easy job of understanding the domain and getting on board as rapidly as possible.

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• Brain picking during job interview

  - by mark

  Recently, I had a job interview at a big Silicon Valley company for a senior software developer/R&D position. I had several technical phone screens, an all day on-site interview and more technical phone screens for another position later. The interviews went really well, I have a PhD and working experience in the area I was applying for yet no offer was made. So far, so good. It was an interesting experience, I am employed, absolutely no hard feelings about this. Some of the interviewers asked really detailed questions to the point of being suspicious about new technologies I have been working on. These technologies are still in development and have not come to market yet. I know some major hardware/software companies are working on this too. I have had many interviews before and based on my former interviewing experience and the impression some of the interviewers left behind, I know now all this company wanted from me is to extract some ideas about what I did in this field. Remember, I am referring to a R&D position, not the standard software developer stuff. Has anybody encountered this situation so far? And how did you deal with it? I am not so much concerned about "stealing" ideas but more about being tricked into showing up for an interview when there is no intension to hire anyway. I am considering refusing technical interviews in the future and instead proposing a trial period in which the company can easily reconsider its hiring decision.

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• Please, tell us how you made Agile work for you?

  - by Paul

  I've been seeing many questions related to Agile. There seems to be confusion between the people who are doing Agile successfully, and those of us who don't understand it. So I'm wondering if some of the successful teams would be willing to give the result of us some examples of how you succeeded. Some of the things I know I wonder What steps did you use? (ie. Talk to users, mock up, tests, code, testing, (whatever)) Tools that helped you? Did you generate any artifacts, other than a working implementation? How did you prevent spaghetti architecture / code? How do you pass along to new team members, or is the team stable for the project How did you determine exit criteria, or was it open ended. (Scope of project?) Did you do this as contracting? How did you develop a contract up-front? Did the business do any up front work? Or did they come to the table with "We want to implement a "bleh bleh blah"? What types of tests did you use? Unit, Integration, UAT? Or did the process make some/all of those unnecessary? Bonus: Do you have an situations / links to "How To" Agile articles, books, etc? Wiki, describes what but not how (to the uninitiated) At least to me, not a duplicate

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• Is it good idea to require to commit only working code?

  - by Astronavigator

  Sometimes I hear people saying something like "All committed code must be working". In some articles people even write descriptions how to create svn or git hooks that compile and test code before commit. In my company we usually create one branch for a feature, and one programmer usually works in this branch. I often (1 per 100, I think and as I think with good reason) do non-compilable commits. It seems to me that requirement of "always compilable/stable" commits conflicts with the idea of frequent commits. A programmer would rather make one commit in a week than test the whole project's stability/compilability ten times a day. For only compilable code I use tags and some selected branches (trunk etc). I see these reasons to commit not fully working or not compilable code: If I develop a new feature, it is hard to make it work writing a few lines of code. If I am editing a feature, it is again sometimes hard to keep code working every time. If I am changing some function's prototype or interface, I would also make hundreds of changes, not mechanical changes, but intellectual. Sometimes one of them could cause me to carry out hundreds of commits (but if I want all commits to be stable I should commit 1 time instead of 100). In all these cases to make stable commits I would make commits containing many-many-many changes and it will be very-very-very hard to find out "What happened in this commit?". Another aspect of this problem is that compiling code gives no guarantee of proper working. So is it good idea to require every commit to be stable/compilable? Does it depends on branching model or CVS? In your company, is it forbidden to make non compilable commits? Is it (and why) a bad idea to use only selected branches (including trunk) and tags for stable versions?

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• Can/should one record unstructured suggestions and feedback in an issue tracker?

  - by Ian Mackinnon

  I'd like to advocate the use of issue-tracking software within an organisation that currently does not use it. But there's one aspect of their situation for which I'm unsure of what to suggest: their projects frequently receive informal verbal feedback or casual comments in meetings or in passing from a wide group of interested parties, and all this information needs to be recorded. Most of these messages are noise, but they're vital to record and share with developers for two reasons: Good suggestions often come out of this process. It can be necessary to have evidence of clients' comments when they forget previous instructions or change their mind. Is this the sort of information that should be stored in an issue-tracking system, or kept apart in a separate solution? Are there issue-tracking systems that have particularly good support for this sort of unstructured information?

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• Should I forward the a call to .Equals onto .Equals<T>?

  - by Jaimal Chohan

  So, I've got you bog standard c# object, overriding Equalsand implementing IEquatable public override int GetHashCode() { return _name.GetHashCode(); } public override bool Equals(object obj) { return Equals(obj as Tag) } #region IEquatable<Tag> Members public bool Equals(Tag other) { if (other == null) return false; else return _name == other._name; } #endregion Now, for some reason, I used to think that forwarding the calls from Equals into Equals was bad, no idea why, perhaps I read it a long time ago, anyway I'd write separate (but logically same) code for each method. Now I think forwarding Equals to Equals is okay, for obvious reasons, but for the life me I can't remember why I thought it wasn't before. Any thoughts?

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